As we all know Wikipedia’s climate articles are just blatant progranda written by the academics who rejected science to run an environmental campaign called “global warming”. And we know those articles cannot be altered because they define them as “only to be based on the views of the ‘scientists’ (academics)”
It is an utter waste of time editing Wikipedia – because even if one of the few real scientists working on climate, writes a paper, all the twits working on climate will speedily get a refutation VIEW published through buddy review so that the academics editing wikipedia can claim that the “scientific” view is …
And because they have this rule against “original research” – it is impossible even to do a linear regression on the last 18 years and say “it hasn’t warmed in 18 years”.
Utter nutcases!
The big problem for sceptics, is that our views are based on the evidence. Obviously the evidence trumps any view particularly a biased academic. But not on Wikipedia.
Several times, I’ve considered starting a new wiki. But in the end, you end up having to make a decision about which views to include and as so much on climate is so palpably wrong and there is no realistic appraisal of the work, the task needs a huge amount of work to produce anything decent.
Proposal
So, I would like to suggest an alternative to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is almost exclusively a collection of assertions supported by reference to “Authority”. In other words, you can include any ridiculous assertion you like, so long as you can find any one of “authority” that has said it. Obviously because most of those contributing are academics, they inherently accept academics as “authority” … so in effect, wikipedia is the ragmag of academic views.
So, my proposal, is to suggest a new online “encyclopaedia”, but this time, the only requirement is that all assertions must be supported by fact.
So, whereas wikipedia demands that every thing in it is supported by a citation to an (academic) authority, a factual encyclopaedia, would demand that every assertion was referenced to the source of the evidence.
In practice, this might not change many articles. But instead of for example saying “ref: Dr Stranglove, eating disorders of politicians”. It would say: “ref: table 1, Eating disorders of politicians see Strangelove”. And it couldn’t say
“all politicians are fat pigs because they all have their noses in the through”. (Strangelove)
It would instead say:
“according to table 1, (Eating disorders of politicians see Strangelove) there is a correlation between the length of time people have been politicians and the weight compared to the normal population.”
And perhaps more important than the actual facts would be the methodology and procedures used to obtain the facts. In a sense the big difference between this and wikipedia is that whereas wikipedia bans original work, in this encyclopaedia ORIGINAL WORKING WOULD BE ENCOURAGED. Because you would want to see the working and methodology and just saying “prof McWorthy says”, would be seen as no better than “A man down the pub says”, unless what was being said was backed by original work and data.
Your thoughts about creating an alternative to Wikipedia is a good one, but there are three problems with creating an “Encyclopedia of facts” on climate.
The first is that the crucial questions can never be “facts” but conjectures. They are can never be actual facts in the same way as in engineering, but (due to the chaotic nature of the data) only vaguely supported by the data.
The second is that if the catastrophic global warming hypothesis were true, nobody would want to wait until it became an established fact. What we need to distinguish is between the better-supported conjectures at one extreme and the flights of
The third is that the people who write Wikipedia believe they are stating “facts”, not ill-supported conjectures. It would be your proper facts, established by a standard, against their “facts” supported by the opinion of “leading experts in the field”. Your “Encyclopedia of facts” would need a companion pseudo-facts and conjectures site.
Thanks for the response.
The Wikipedia test for a “fact” is “was it said by an ‘expert’? (really meaning an academic)”. But most sceptics are not interested who said something but in stead only whether the facts are supported by data.
In traditional science, those are usually one and the same thing. The problem in the area of the climate, is that the academics don’t really distinguish between out and out views and facts supported by evidence.
But it would be interesting to see what kind of a thing applying that rule produced!
An illustration of the problem comes from the most infamous wiki-editor of them all – William Connolley. Climate is a broad subject, but he thinks himself an expert on every aspect. Not only that, he believes himself to be an authority on everything else that he thinks about. I did a couple of articles in August, to which he responded. The first was on legal opinions, the second on the definition of the word “sceptic”.
http://manicbeancounter.com/2014/08/23/william-connolleys-correction-of-the-dictionary/
http://manicbeancounter.com/2014/08/14/william-connolley-supports-the-climate-faith-against-expert-opinions/
Yes, he would be the typical person you want to stop pushing their views. As far as I can see Connolley is totally unqualified in science.
However, I fully believe that you are right to looking at the problem of distinguishing facts against opinions/assertions/beliefs/conjectures. A first step might be the properly define the areas of expertise. Wikipedia has an article on climatology which provides the definition of the subject. It says nothing about many other areas where “climate scientists” are deemed experts, such as economics, energy consultants, public policy-making, etc. Crucial to the subject are climate models capable of making long-term predictions about climate. Without predictive successes climatology cannot claim to understand climate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatology
That’s a good point. The academics claim to be experts in a vast swathe of subjects where they are not. But someone like me, who actually has training is prevented from editing because I’m not an academic.